With $10 million to start with, e-commerce giant Blibli celebrate their first anniversary in Jakarta today. Their first year, Blibli recorded 5 million visitors to their website averaging 15 thousand visitors each day, growing from 3 thousands daily visitors when they first launched the service.
According to Marketing Head Ivan Hudyana, Blibli is seriously entering the scene to be the best online retailers in Indonesia. Unlike their competitors, Blibli curates the merchants allowed to sell items on the website. This is maybe the key strength for Blibli in order to associate the brand with high-quality items. Another promotion feature such as “1 hour delivery service” for Telkomsel’s iPhone 4S launch a few months ago also puts Blibli in par with other giant e-commerce companies in Indonesia.
Product-wise, Blibli went under several revamps in order to improve their website. The most significant change was to reduce 5 step shopping into 3 steps shopping, reducing the amount of process customers has to go to in order to complete a transaction.
This year, Blibli has been focusing on awareness campaigns and educating Indonesian consumers the benefits of buying items online. Hudyana said this year Blibli doesn’t have a special focus other than to gain revenue as much as possible. Blibli has indeed spend tons of money to promote their services and promotions, obviously seen from their ads all over the internet and even offline billboards, radio.
Hudyana, in the press event also opens the possibility for Blibli to develop apps and a device attached to a smartphone or tablet that enables people to pay using credit cards by swapping it. In short, they’re thinking to build a Square-like device for Indonesian market. Hudyana refuse to add more information about it, but I think we will see shortly whether Blibli is able to pull this plan.
disclaimer: blibli and dailysocial is under the same group
